Category Archive

• We’ve reached that lovely point in the toddler life cycle in which 5, 5:30, 6 in the morning equals an acceptable, nay, perfect time to get up for the day. No matter that it is pitch dark, that others are sleeping. Well, why not play with trains before dawn? You only live once.
• The advantage of having an older child is knowing that as much as stage x sucks, it’s not forever. (There are many days when Miss M sleeps until 6:45 or even 7.) It will be replaced by a stage even less likeable. But maybe not as exhausting.
• I almost screwed myself over in the most idiotic way ever this morning. I was in the bathroom. (Again! I know!) AM came to visit. He brought Wolfie, his little stuffed wolf that he snuggles in bed and generally drags around. And kisses and nurses from his belly button. “You brought Wolfie?” I said, jokingly. ”Does Wolfie need to go potty?” “Yah!” he exclaimed. And turned on his heel and ran top speed to the other bathroom. Ohhhh, this was not good. “AM! AM! Come back!” I heard the toilet flip up and the sound of the potty ring.  “No no no no no!” I got there just in time. But really? Still kicking myself over the potential Wolfie crisis.
• I haven’t talked about speech therapy in a while. It’s going. Slowly. But it’s going. To my ears, AM is more imitative of speech, and will even do at home, when he thinks nobody is watching, what he refuses to do at therapy. He’s even starting to ‘fill in the blank’ of some of his favorite Laurie Berkner tunes, along the lines of…”The elephant sneezed…Ah, ah, ah-choo!” Mucho cuteness.
• I am pretty lazy when it comes to housekeeping, but when it comes to doing right by my children I try to step it up. Because they are my kids and need my advocacy and support. So I am totally confused by another mom at preschool. Her little one is about two months younger than AM and does not speak at all. I offered her my Signing Time videos a few months ago, but she said no. She told me today that he qualified for speech therapy and was going to start in a few weeks, and it was a good thing because he spends a lot of the day crying, she assumes, out of frustration. I re-offered my video collection–he is at an age when he has the fine motor skills to pick up signing really quickly–and she said that he wouldn’t watch on his own and she was “too lazy to watch with him.” Too lazy to watch TV? I can’t even imagine. I also can’t imagine just being ok with waiting when he is obviously in such distress.* My heart just aches for this little boy when I think about how much we all “talk” with AM. Really from the second he wakes up in the darkness and tells me he wants to nurse. Then he wants to play with trains. Then he wants a glass of milk. And cereal. And an orange. What if he couldn’t?
• [Update!] SQUEEEEE! Rachel Coleman (or someone writing her emails) left a comment on this post. THE Rachel Coleman, creator and star of Signing Time. I feel the burning need to tell Amalah, because she would fully appreciate my starstruck babbling, although she has like 40,000 readers and probably would filter me out as spam. All I need now is Laurie Berkner to pop in and say hi and I will rule the toddler universe!

* I am totally down with Caramama’s idea of being less judgmental of other moms. But really, when a mom says she can’t be bothered about something that I personally feel could turn this kid’s entire world around? What if he hadn’t qualified for speech therapy? What then? I am not trying to hold myself up as Ideal Mother, not at all. We found something that works. But if my child was reduced to tears over something as basic as not being able to communicate at an age appropriate level? I’d be trying to find a way. Mind reading, tea leaves, anything! And you’d think she knows because he is in physical therapy, but speech therapy is not a panacea. Progress is slow at best and measured over a course of months. So that’s a long time to have such an unhappy little one.

AM does, in fact, appear to be saying his friend T’s sister’s name. He yelled “Ay-ya-ya!” (let me translate for you: “Ariella!”) across a vestibule crowded with 3-year-olds and their accompanying din at preschool pickup.

This very morning he and Miss M were bickering over a toy in the kids’ bedroom. She started chanting “mine, mine, mine.” Then we heard a little voice pipe up: “mi, mi, mi, mi.” I scuttled down the hall from the kitchen and Taxman poked his head out of our bedroom. We looked at each other quizzically, as if we had just dropped in from Mars. “Is he saying ‘mine’?” Uh…maybe?

In speech therapy today he was a total pill. Ornery and uncooperative pretty much from the word go. Finally at the end of the session, I was getting him into his outerwear and telling him we were going to go to the store. “And what do we buy at the store?” (This is a whole routine. He acts it out by himself at home, complete with a shopping bag and/or cat backpack. We’re taking it on the road soon.) He signed “banana” and then, deviating from the script, quickly followed it up with “orange”–he is rather addicted to clementines. The grad student said to him, “Oh, you’re getting bananas and oranges?” And he started babbling “ba, ba, ba, ba.” “Is he saying ‘banana’?” she asked. “I didn’t know he can say ‘b’!” I confirmed that he does say ’b,’ but as for the rest…I don’t know. He never does this.

Anyway, the funniest thing coming out of speech therapy recently was when the grad student asked me if it was ok for her to try to get AM to say “no.” “Professor L specifically wanted me to get your permission.” Which is so funny to me, because Professor L has told me that she has kids–twins, no less. I laughed and told her that he has plenty of ways to express no without actually saying it. He shakes his head, he makes disapproving noises, he “goes boneless,” he throws himself on the floor, he ignores you entirely, giving you a vision of him as teenager. A week later, I still think this is so funny–I mean, what 21-/22-month old only has one way to say no? How about a random sample? Michaela? B? CCW?

• File this under “things I now know that I wish I didn’t”: If your order at Lands’ End is more than $200, you pay a flat rate for shipping.
• But I did get really good deals on parkas for the kids, hopefully to fit each of them for the next two winters. Although I could not find a “boys” sale parka I liked for AM, so I wound up with a “girls” one for him. In green. I figured why not, seeing as how I bought Miss M’s parka in yellow (excuse me, “honey gold”) fully intending that he will wear it when she outgrows it. What are the styling differences at this age, anyway? Just the zipper on the opposite side? It’s not like a 3T parka is going to come with a pocket to secret away a lipstick and a tampon!
• I seem to have survived a week of preschool vacation. Barely. But whoo-hoo!
• Honestly, last week would have been a wash anyway. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (if I were adhering to the school “health policy”) would have been sick days, and Friday surely would have been a snow day.
• AM’s progress in speech therapy is, well, slow. He says “more” now, and “in” (sort of), but it’s a struggle to get him to focus beyond the toys.
• He did appear to imitate one of his little friends saying her sister’s name the other day. Her mom–my neighbor, who knows almost as much as Taxman about the current ins and outs of my life–was here when he did it and she (all 39 weeks pregnant of her) just about fell off the couch in surprise. I spent the next two days attempting to get him to repeat it.  
• The most fascinating thing about therapy for me is that he totally knows the score. As in, he can walk all over the grad student, but when her professor pops in to offer advice, he snaps to attention. Looks her right in the face, tries to imitate her facial movements. Then she leaves and he goes back to his own agenda: ”Cars, cars, I want more cars!” How he understands the power balance in that relationship I have no idea. But clearly he was not born yesterday.
• Am I a crappy mother because I don’t cut Miss M’s grapes? (And only cut AM’s if he’s going to be wandering around with them instead of eating them directly in front of me?) She bites them. I don’t let her have chewing gum or hard candy, if that changes your opinion. I ask because I saw a kid who’s over four years old having her grapes cut for her. And this was with everyone sitting around the table, including Taxman (the EMT).
• Finally, I have to link to the funniest thing I have read lately: Amalah’s description of pregnancy hunger. Language is R-rated, if you care about that sort of thing, but it is beyond hysterical. Excellent riff on Girl Scout cookies included. (CCW, in case you have extra boxes to sell?)

The good news from speech therapy: AM is getting comfortable. He spent only the first two minutes of the session on my lap.

The bad news from speech therapy: AM is getting comfortable. He spent part of the session today lying on the rug and lining up toy cars, which is exactly what he does at home with his vehicles. He asked for trains (his preference over cars) about a dozen times. And he would like to direct his own play, thank you very much. What do you mean no more bubbles today? What is this ridiculous insistence on saying “more”* before being allowed to acquire something? And if push comes to shove, could we just play with the video monitors in the control room, where all the clinic sessions are taped? He likes it in there. Fun times.

But really, he must think the adults in his life are idiots. One of the cars in the room today was an ambulance. So I said, “Who drives an ambulance?” And he signed, “Abba.” And then I said, peering into the tiny, blacked-out windows, “Is Abba driving the ambulance? Where is he?” And AM looked at me as if I were thick and signed (around the ambulance in his hands), “Work.”

Well, well. At least someone is paying attention.

* He came out with something that sounded like “meh” maybe three times over the course of an hour. No huge gains yet.

AM got a spot at a university speech clinic. This is, frankly, awesome. It is 10 minutes from our house. It is two hours a week, while Miss M is in school. It is $150 for the entire spring semester.

His “therapist” is a grad student, who will be supervised by her professor. Yesterday they put him through his paces to see what he could do. They came to the conclusion that he a) is adorable and b) understands everything you say to him.

Yes, yes.

But clearly they don’t know any ASL. Because not only was he directing his way around the toys and having a rotten time with the mouth and lip exercises (I was doing them because clearly he would have freaked out to have a stranger touch his face), at one point he had decided he had had E.NOUGH. He plopped into my lap and signed to nurse. I said no. He signed for a snack. I said no. He consented to page through a board book, but then suddenly signed “all done.” Emphatically. Then he stood up, signed it again and signed “coat.” As in, “Where the hell is my damn coat, lady? I am OUT OF HERE.”

I distracted him with trains from home so I could finish talking to the professionals. So I have a little trepidation about Monday. And Wednesday. And the following Monday. Etc.

Hopefully it will just take a few sessions to work out the kinks, although an hour of paying attention is an eternity for a toddler in any situation. Please cross your available digits for us!

Apparently the stigma of being under psychological care is real, not only perceived.

Someone I know is going through a rough time and could use the services of a therapist. However, this person needs services in a Slightly Distant City. Close enough to see a show there; too far for me to be able to ask people around here for referrals. Because the other option for this person is to essentially look in the phone book for names. (Or, to call a spade a spade, take names from a health insurance website.)

Through some divine act of memory I was able to recall that someone I know around here grew up in Slightly Distant City. Although she has probably not lived at home in 10-15 years, her parents still live there. I wrote her an email this morning, describing the need in the briefest of terms and asking if she or her parents knew of anyone (or knew of anyone who knew anyone) who could provide such services. I was not asking, mind you, for personal experiences, just even a name of someone reputable. Within minutes I had a return email to the effect of: “What? Do I know you? We don’t know anyone or anything that can help your friend in any way. Sorry.”

I would blame it on the hush-hush fishbowl aspects of the Orthodox community, except that this person (like myself) did not grow up Orthodox. In fact, she is hippy-dippy enough that I would think she’d be open to the idea of people needing help from time to time.

So what’s a friend to do? Open the Yellow Pages?

You tell me.

So AM’s application to participate in state-sponsored early intervention has been turned down.

Sounds so much nicer than “he has been disqualified” or “he’s been rejected,” which of course is what I’ve been saying to everyone around here.

The long and short of it is: he is age-appropriate in every other way. Yes, his expressive language is not even on the charts, but his receptive language is fine. He communicates. He has good cognitive skills. When shown a picture of a baby during the testing with a special education teacher, he noticed that the baby had no clothes on and signed “bath.” So basically, we couldn’t have dumbed him down if we tried.

The speech therapist’s report listed 12 oral/speech objectives that he is not meeting and strongly indicated the need for therapy in general, but at the same time she had noted that his receptive skills were acceptable and therefore meant that he did not meet the qualifying level of two standard deviations below the mean. She basically said that she hoped he was delayed in another area, because two scores of 1.5 standard deviations below the mean also qualify. No such “luck.”

Through Early Intervention we basically have no recourse except to wait a few months and do it all again. All of it–social workers, forms, everything. Our case worker told us if we wanted to try to keep the file open it would require approval from the Regional Supervisor (I swear there were caps in her voice when she said it). And probably nothing would come of it except the command to wait a few months and do it again.

It’s frustrating as hell.

Thankfully, we have good health insurance, which would cover a lot of private speech therapy. The weekly or twice-weekly co-pays will suck, to be sure, but we have flex-spending, so it’s pre-tax dollars, which, Taxman tells me, is good. (Honestly, I haven’t a clue.) Better than the alternative, anyway, of paying out of pocket for everything.

Or we can try the university speech clinic route, although I don’t know how to get into one.

I just want to do something. Soon. I am tired of sitting on my hands and waiting. There’s work to be done, and I want to begin.

Yes, I should be cleaning my living room for company, but honestly this is the daytime cup of tea I have had all week.

• Miss M is by turns infuriating and cute. (What? This is BRAND NEW INFORMATION!) No, really. The cute is that she says funny things and “reads” books to all of us almost verbatim.
• The infuriating is a long list: We have caught her sucking her thumb at night because, we think, AM does it. But he started at three months old. Three and a half years seems a tad late for that, no? She has started dawdling to the max while eating or dressing. Grrr. Her latest response to being told no, or not now, or I don’t think so, is to violently throw herself to the floor. I think this is very obnoxious and will ultimately result in her really hurting herself. But she didn’t ask my opinion.
• AM is getting more defiant by the day. Still very cute, but OY! it is only a matter of time before he gets hurt or I lose my mind.
• I have had to try very hard not to respond to either/both of them with the phrase: “This is SUCH BULLSHIT!”
• Because I’d lose all of my mother of the year votes. So close to the end of the year, it seems a shame.
• We had two therapy evaluators come Wednesday to see AM. The speech therapist gave an initial diagnosis within two minutes. There were a lot of questions about his eating habits, which turned out to be related to her suspicions. He stuffs food into his mouth, which I thought was just a toddler thing, but apparently relates to his jaw musculature and oral sensation.* Also very important was Taxman’s seemingly (to me) irrelevant comment that he likes spicy/garlicky food. That was kind of the linchpin. She was afraid, though, that he would score too high in other areas to get services. “But I only hear him making vowel sounds, so that’s good.” I said, “Off the record, he does make consonant sounds while he is babbling.” “I didn’t hear that!” she exclaimed. Good grief.
• Meanwhile, the special ed teacher was shocked by how good his “play skills” are and his responsiveness and critical thinking and attention span.
• Hey, state of New York, we never said he wasn’t smart. He just doesn’t speak and now we have a good sense of why! If you don’t approve us for therapy we are NOT going to wait six months to re-evaluate. We are going to take our good health insurance benefits and use them!
• (Chichimama, thanks for the heads up on all the qualifying vs not stuff!)
• I have been obsessing about really unimportant things lately. For example, I made a meal for a family who is spending a lot of time at the hospital. I spent way too much time debating if I should make salad dressing from scratch or just pop some bottled Italian into a Dixie container. Because really, when your husband/father is battling pancreatic cancer, salad dressing is what you are going to notice. Of course I wound up making honey mustard vinaigrette from scratch and sending extra brownies; food is emotional comfort, right?
• Both my book clubs pushed their January books to the extreme end of the month. If I read now I will never remember what happens. I feel like I am at loose ends. I grabbed Girl with a Pearl Earring last night, but 15 pages in I am not sure that I will really love it.
• I think I got almost seven hours of sleep last night. Wow.
• I should be less cranky if that’s true.
• I am very torn over trying to nightwean AM. Many nights now, he does nurse but goes right back to sleep without a problem. And he really nurses, as if he is hungry, so I think it is more than just a comfort thing. (Miss M, who we nightweaned at the same age, would wake up, nurse for 10 seconds. That was not worth it.) He often goes 7p to 4a (or even 4:30), which is just so much better than 2:30, somehow. If we do it, there will just be a lot of crying and more disturbed sleep. I am not sure I am up for that.
• I really should go to bed at 10:30 every night. It makes a huge difference.
• But then we’d have to be invited out for Shabbat meals every week for the rest of our lives. Because I can’t get much done when the clowns are awake and climbing the furniture. It took me 25 minutes to put together a chicken marinade this morning–if I had done it when everyone was sleeping it would have taken less than five. So you see my dilemma.
• Ok, 20 crayons are calling me from the floor. “Put us awaaaaaayyyyyy!”
• How’s by you?

* Um, yeah, so I feel pretty dumb/guilty for not noticing and/or not thinking that it was relevant. In my favor, though, I did pick up on the fact that he drools more than I think he should.

The Early Intervention (EI) people keep showing up at my house. This is fine, although they keep coming many days after my cleaning lady. I am a crappy housekeeper, so this causes no end of stress.

Anyway, a social worker came last Tuesday. She asked a lot of questions to get a general sense of how AM is, other than his speech, uh, issues. From my perspective, he’s meeting all his other milestones and is generally happy, adorable, and age-appropriate.

The social worker was a little late, so I woke AM up before she arrived. He was eating lunch when she came, and he was at his most charming, offering me cannellini beans from his bowl, wiggling happily as I offered him a clementine, and using lots of signs. “Is he always like this?” the social worker asked. I replied that he usually was pretty happy and low key. “And how does he communicate what he wants? Through signing?” Yes, I explained, but he sometimes just points and what he wants is crystal clear.

AM finished his lunch. We finished our interview. As Ms. Social Worker was gathering her things, AM marched over to the books, selected one, and handed it to her. He then clambered up to the couch and patted the cushion next to him. Heh. Charming and communicative. That’s my baby.

On AM’s potential speech therapy: Visit from the case worker was a big to-do about nothing. It was basically signing his life away. Ok, not really, just agreeing that All the Important Professionals can share information about him. The case worker looked like she was about 18,* but she’s been calling every couple of days with updates as events warrant, so I can’t complain. Although she seemed pretty flustered when I told him that we don’t call him “J” (his legal name, but the one that we use for things like health insurance, medical records, etc.) but rather a-cute-Hebrew-nickname-for-AM. I had to repeat myself twice. But she might have been making sure that we did not need to redo all the paperwork registering him under “J TiredFamily.” Why is the idea of a nickname so hard to understand? No idea. To be honest, though, I thought that the case worker was going to have some minimal evaluation of him, in which case it would have been important to know that he does not respond to the name “J”–this is why I brought it up in the first place.

On nightweaning: Still a dumbass. But the beginning of the end is December 21st. I mean it.

On hats: No progress. I went hat shopping in upscale-New-Jersey-hotbed-of-religious-Jews and could not bring myself to spend $130 on a hat. And that was cheap. I tried on a brown felt (felt! not, like, mink or something) for $351. I kid you not. Maybe Brooklyn is cheaper, but going there requires a great deal of planning. Maybe berets are truly the way to go, so we can continue to, you know, eat.

On division of labor: As I was driving, singing along to Laurie Berkner, a voice piped up from the back, “Ema, stop singing! That’s Laurie’s job!” Perhaps LB would like to trade…just for a little while.

On excellent big brother potential: When our nephew (who is almost four and a half) met his little sister, he kept remarking about how little she is. But then he said he’d love her even when she gets big. Seriously, is that not the cutest?

* She also didn’t seem to know all that much about babies. When I said that I was concerned about AM’s drooling, given his age, I also said, “But he doesn’t have all his teeth yet, so who knows.” And she looked kind of confused.

We have our “pre-evaluation” evaluation tomorrow, in case there are concerns other than speech.

Assuming the case worker makes it here. During a 10-minute conversation, during which I gave her explicit, landmarked directions via bus & streets, she said “I’m afraid of getting lost!” or “Oh, I hope I don’t get lost!” at least a dozen times. I had offered to bring AM to her office, but when I asked about parking there, she got flustered and said she’d just come to us.

The funniest thing is…I live in a pretty ritzy neighborhood, as compared to the rest of my borough. Doorman buildings, co-ops, overpriced supermarkets, million-dollar homes, Starbucks. Ok, the Starbucks is new, but the rest of it has been around for a long time. So if she gets lost, I hope she has an umbrella to beat back the old Jewish ladies. And those identical twins in their 70s who dress alike, down to the handbag, and walk the streets clinging to each other.

But anyway.

During our brief conversation I got the impression that this case worker has not seen the likes of me before. I mentioned that AM does not say words, but understands everything and uses ASL signs to communicate. “But how,” she asked, approximately four seconds later, “does he tell you what he wants?” Uh, did I not just explain?

I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of blogging material here. Stay tuned. I must go collect the kids’ books from all over the house and put them front and center in the living room.